#old good internet

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Incomplete vs. overshoot

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in Seattle (Feb 26) with Neal Stephenson, then Portland, Phoenix and more!

You know the "horseshoe theory," right? "The far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear continuum of the political spectrum, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

It's a theory that only makes sense if you don't know much about the right and the left and what each side wants out of politics.

Take women's suffrage. The early suffragists ("suffragettes" in the UK) were mostly interested in votes for affluent, white women – not women as a body. Today's left criticizes the suffrage movement on the basis that they didn't go far enough:

https://www.npr.org/2011/03/25/134849480/the-root-how-racism-tainted-womens-suffrage

Contrast that with Christian Dominionists – the cranks who think that embryos are people (though presumably not for the purpose of calculating a state's electoral college vote? Though it would be cool if presidential elections turned on which side of a state line a fertility clinic's chest-freezer rested on):

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how-alabama-ivf-ruling-was-influenced-christian-nationalism-on-the-media?tab=summary

These people are part of a far-right coalition that wants to abolish votes for women. As billionaire far-right bagman Peter Thiel wrote that he thought it was a mistake to let women vote at all:

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

Superficially, there's some horseshoe theory action going on here. The left thinks the suffragists were wrong. The right thinks they were wrong, too. Therefore, the left and the right agree!

Well, they agree that the suffragists were wrong, but for opposite reasons – and far, far more importantly, they totally disagree about what they want. The right wants a world where no women can vote. The left wants a world where all women can vote. The idea that the right and the left agree on women's suffrage is, as the physicists say, "not even wrong."

It's the kind of wrong that can only be captured by citing scripture, specifically, A Fish Called Wanda, 6E, 79: "The central message of Buddhism is not 'Every man for himself.' And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up."

Or take the New Deal. While the New Deal set its sites on liberating workers from precarity, abuse and corruption, the Dealers – like the suffragists – had huge gaps in their program, omitting people of color, indigenous people, women, queer people, etc. There are lots of leftists who criticize the New Deal on this basis: it didn't go far enough:

https://livingnewdeal.org/new-deal-and-race/

But for the past 40 years, America has seen a sustained, vicious assault on New Deal programs, from Social Security to Medicare to food stamps to labor rights to national parks, funded by billionaires who want to bring back the Gilded Age and turn us all into forelock-tugging plebs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

If you only view politics as a game of elementary school cliques, you might say that the left and the right are meeting again. The left says Roosevelt got it wrong with the New Deal (because he left out so many people). The right says FDR was wrong for doing the New Deal in the first place. Therefore, the left and the right agree, right?

Obviously wrong. Obviously. Again, the important thing is why the left and the right think the New Deal deserves criticism. The important thing is what the left and the right want. The left wants universal liberation. The right wants us all in economic chains. They do not agree.

It's not always just politics, either. Take the old, good internet. That was an internet defined by technological self-determination, a wild and wooly internet where there were few gatekeepers, where disfavored groups could find each other and make common cause, where users who were threatened by the greed of the shareholders behind big services could install blockers, mods, alternative clients and other "adversarial interoperability" tools that seized the means of computation.

Today's enshitternet – "five giant websites, filled with screenshots of the other four" (h/t Tom Eastman) – is orders of magnitude more populous than that old, good internet. The enshitternet has billions of users, and they are legally – and technologically – prevented from taking any self-help measures when the owners of services change them to shift value from users to themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

The anti-enshittification movement rightly criticizes the old, good internet because it wasn't inclusive enough. It was a system almost exclusively hospitable to affluent, privileged people – the people who least needed the liberatory power of technology.

Likewise pro-enshittification monopolists – billionaires and their useful idiots – deplore the old, good internet because it gave its users too much power. For them, ad-blocking, alternative clients, mods, reverse-engineering and so on were all bugs, not features. For them, the enshitternet is great because businesses can literally criminalize taking action to protect yourself from their predatory impulses:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

Superficially, it seems like the pro- and anti-enshittification forces agree – they both agree that the old, good internet was a mistake. But the difference that matters here is that the pro-enshittification side wants everyone mired in the enshitternet forever, living with what Jay Freeman calls "Felony contempt of business-model." By contrast, the disenshittification side wants a new, good internet that gives every user – not just a handful of techies – the power to decide how the digital systems they work use, and to be able to alter or reconfigure them to suit their own needs.

The horsehoe theory only makes sense if you don't take into account the beliefs and goals of each side. Politics aren't just a matter of who you agree with on a given issue – the real issue is what you're trying to accomplish.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/#substantive-disagreement

[oldinterneticons]

Top icons posted to @oldinterneticons in September 2024

[californiastatelibrary]

Those aren't hoodie strings, they're book snakes! What's a book snake? Our lovely reference and outreach librarian is here to tell you all about them.

[ao3commentoftheday]

While looking for something else, I found an old ask I answered about "ideal chapter length" in terms of word count.

I've been asked this probably a dozen or more times, and each time I need to take a moment and adjust my thinking to take the asker's point of view into account. Because the thing is? The only time I ever try to factor the word count into how I write a story is when I'm aiming for a true drabble.

For whatever reason, this difference in thinking stuck with me today and I actually considered why that might be. And I think it's because I'm in my 40s and the first 25-30 years of my life, any stories I was reading were printed on paper and bound into physical books.

When I imagine a novel, I still think of a mass market paperback on my bookshelf. An average one would be maybe an inch thick, probably in the neighbourhood of 300 pages. A long one would be maybe as much as two inches thick and 500 or more pages long. A short one was always nice to have because it filled in the gaps in the shelf because 200 page books were so much narrower. Or so it seemed.

When I started posting my fic online, I still thought in terms of pages. I'd type them out in whatever word processing software I was using at the time, and I'd usually get a chapter's worth of ideas into 3 or 4 pages. Turns out that's about 1000 words, which makes sense with the number of 1000 word essays I wrote in high school. I'd been trained to encapsulate an idea into approximately that length.

And that's what it comes down to. The thing that always made that question seem weird to me. A chapter isn't about how many words there are in it, just like a cake isn't about how many cups of flour exist in each slice. A chapter is a an idea that helps make up a bigger idea called a story, and it needs to be however many words that idea needs to be to get it out.

[spearxwind]

actually while im on the httyd topic I have something else to say. I really hate post httyd 1 toothless and the way the marketing took the design.

I know everyone has talked about this so much already but man it just really REALLY hits especially when looking at footage from the old movie again. the head shape being pug-ified... bigger puppier squarer eyes. almost no trace of the ability of actually having slit pupils. the erasure of his markings. the toning down of his night blue iridescent sheen in certain lights in favor of pure monochrome black... it is such a downgrade.

I think something the movies after the first one rly fail at is in making dragons feel fearsome. they just get reduced to cool pets and that´s just... weird imo. I know in the books dragons are pets too but they get treated as hunting dogs too. it would have been cool to explore that as opposed to just "huge as fuck dogs/cats that also fly"

they are creatures that have shared the world with people for aeons, hunting and being hunted. it´s two species going toe to toe head to head for centuries. a tamed wolf is still a wolf and wolves are dangerous. it's sad that we didn't get that. i know a lot of it is bc its a kids movie but man... man. let them keep a bit of their edge at least... its part of what makes them so cool. its part of the stakes of everything!

[thisischeri]

instagram: cheri.png

[polymerclay]

Some of my fav drawception panels that i made. Lalalala

[yeerkyeerk]

Animorphs book club my beloved.

I suspect that when this thing is over if we don't do it again, it's going to be one of my most cherished Tumblr memories. Thank you all, for reading the books, for your posts, for filling my dashboard with something that I actually am interested in, something that, while heavy at times, is light enough compared to real life that it feels like an escape

Animorphs rules, and the tumblr community rules even harder.

[hua-liansimp]

Ok but I need him I need more content of him he's the best murder lizard ever

[goodstockimages]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

I miss the old, good internet, but I don’t want to bring it back.

I want a new, good internet. One where users can’t be locked in because we make it legal to:

• reverse-engineer products and services, so you can leave a social media platform but still send and receive messages from the people you leave behind;

• jailbreak your devices so you can remove antifeatures like surveillance, ink-locking or repair-blocking; • move your media and files out of the silo whence they originated and into any player you want.

I want a new, good internet where we constrain the conduct of tech companies, banning unfair labor practices, deceptive marketing, corporate hostage-taking and other forms of rent-extraction.

I want a new, good internet where it’s both illegal to impose bossware on your employees, and where those employees can legally hack the bossware their bosses shove down their throats.

I want a new, good internet where creative workers and their audiences can reliably connect with one another, where news reporting isn’t held hostage to extractive processes.

I want a new, good internet where we seize the means of computation so that the digital infrastructure that connects our romantic, personal, political, civic, economic, educational and family and social lives is operated by and for the people who use it.

-Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet

[kodasea]

Reading yesterday's news

[candlemassive]

chappel roan blinkies. please. even if pride month just ended </3

When I first heard of Chappell I never thought I'd like her music as much as I did. #1 femininomenon listener over here

[thisischeri]

instagram: cheri.png

[1nternetangel]

[canon-gabriel-quotes]

I always respect your rule about suggestive posts, and I am 100% on board with it.

However please keep in mind that at least on mobile if there are many tags on a post some of these will be hidden! And some people might not notice the tag! Even I sometimes caught myself almost liking/reblogging something because I zoned out and didn't notice (I'm also a dummy and might not register that something is suggestive, especially that english isn't my first language.) When tagging questionable posts, please put the #suggestive tag first. Or not, I'm not gonna order you how to tag your posts, but please concider.

Thank you for reading and have a good weekend!

Sincerely, a 16yo ULTRAKILL fan

I’ll try to remember to put that tag at the front. I schedule all the posts when I’m at work so I’m usually more preoccupied with making sure no one is standing behind me while I’m doing that so the tags are an afterthought. But like I said I’ll try to fix that for future posts.

But anyway I reblogged that warning cause I had to block 2 accounts that followed and blatantly said they were 14. Meaning they couldn’t bother to read the short af blog description I have there. It’s right there as soon as you open the account. I can’t make it any more obvious. And I know they scrolled through the account because they were liking old posts that were tagged as well. They didn’t just follow from their dashboard. Not slick.

Like. Come on. I too was on tumblr from the age of 13 but I had the common sense to not do that. Stay out of trouble. Don’t cross people’s boundaries. 10 years from now you’ll realize how uncomfortable it’d be to have a 14 year old thirst posting in your replies.

If you’re going to do it anyway. Do that in your private discord or whatever with your friends that are (hopefully) around your age, I can’t stop you. But doing it out in the open with 0 respect is an auto block from me. Not only because it’s weird, but it opens themselves up to being creeped on.